Big Data Drives Enterprise Software Growth: IDC

The enterprise software market grew 5.5 percent during the first half of 2013, driven in part by growing demand for Big Data solutions.

Big Data solutions helped tech companies achieve a moderately healthy rise in enterprise software sales during the first six months of 2013, according to new study from research firm IDC.

In the first half of 2013, the worldwide enterprise software market reached $179 billion in revenues, a 5.5 percent year-over-year improvement, and just 0.2 percentage points short of the research group's own forecast. Big Data solutions gave the market some pep, suggested IDC Senior Vice President Henry D. Morris.

"Enterprises are seeing new opportunities to drive new and improved products and services by leveraging information," said Morris. He added that "it stands to reason that software to manage, access, and share information (structured and unstructured) continues to be a priority for competing in today's economy and a driver of software market growth."

In a bid to stay competitive, and despite a skills shortage, businesses are increasing their Big Data investments.

IDC noted that within the Applications Development and Deployment market segment, the Structured Data Management category notched a year-over-year growth rate of over 6 percent. This is largely due to growth in the Relational Database Management Systems market, which grew at 7 percent year over year thanks to Big Data and analytics adoption.

Big Data Products on the Way

Vendors are responding to this shift with an ever expanding array of Big Data processing and analytics offerings.

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SAP last week during TechEd 2013 unveiled the latest version of its in-memory processing platform, HANA SP7. The updated product brings with it "the unprecedented ability to calculate in real time things that were previously unimaginable with SAP HANA on 10,000 CPU cores," boasted SAP Executive Board member Dr. Vishal Sikka at its unveiling. The company also inked a deal with SAS to bring the company's analytics software to the HANA platform.

October also marked a big milestone for the Big Data ecosystem at large: the official release of Hadoop 2.0. After a four-year development effort, Hortonworks founder and Apache Hadoop 2 release manager Arun C. Murthy, told Enterprise Apps Today earlier this month, "Hadoop is already a key component of the modern data architecture on top of which several enterprises have built their applications.

Enterprise Social Growth

Another big winner was the Enterprise Social Networks category, which surged 28.3 percent and claims 13 percent of the Collaborative Applications market. "It has gained 10 points of market share in the last five years within an environment that includes mature solutions such as email Applications," observed IDC.

Microsoft ruled the enterprise software scene during 2013's first half, with $32.9 billion in sales for 18.4 percent of the market. Oracle placed second with $15.4 billion in revenues and an 8.6 percent share of the market. IBM, SAP and Symantec rounded out the top five.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Apps Today. Follow him on Twitter@ecoINSITE.